How can you answer the question about what is a monument?

Who from among us from early childhood does not know what a monument is? The culture of memory distinguishes man from all other living beings on earth. Thanks to the ability to remember, to store the past social experience, society lives and develops.

But still, a concept that is simple at first glance, as a monument, also needs to be defined. Let's try to give it in this article.

Explanation of the concept

If we open an explanatory dictionary, we learn from it that the term we are studying has several definitions.

First, the monument is called the object of cultural heritage in the broadest sense of the word. These are monuments of architecture or art, writing or history.

Secondly, any work of art is called a monument that preserves the memory of certain events (for example, the Battle of Kulikovo Field or the Battle of Borodino) or people (monuments to Peter the Great, Kutuzov, Lenin, Dostoevsky, etc.).

Thirdly, there are monuments that are customary to put near the burial places of the deceased. In Christian culture, such a symbol becomes a cross placed on the grave, or a tombstone with the name of the deceased and the dates of his birth and death.

Monuments as a science

To understand what a monument is, modern science helps to memorize, which pays special attention to the symbolic meaning of memory in the life of human society. Let's consider it in more detail.

This science assumes that all cultural objects of memory can be studied by singling out certain criteria for their division into groups:

1. On the typological basis, these cultural objects can be divided into monuments of nature, architecture, history, culture and monuments of art, etc.
2. If possible, these monuments are divided into movable (for example, paintings, statues, etc.) and immovable (for example, St. Isaac's Cathedral in St. Petersburg, the Louvre in France, etc.).
3. According to the exaltation of the object, the monuments are divided into statues, triumphal columns, commemorative plaques, memorial complexes, and also such specific kind of monuments as perpetuating the tools of war (most often trophy), such as cannons, airplanes, tanks and so on.

What is a monument? The history of the phenomenon

Still our distant ancestors began to build monuments. These include ancient constructions such as the Egyptian pyramids for burial in them of bodies of pharaohs and members of their families, pyramids of Indians of pre-colonial America, tombstones of nomadic peoples and so on.

Similar buildings were willingly erected by the inhabitants of Ancient Greece and Rome, using them in exaltation of emperors and gods and in glorifying military commanders.

In medieval Europe, it was customary to establish monuments to monarchs and build majestic temples, which were the greatest monuments to God the Creator.

This tradition has survived in the European culture of modern times. Therefore, each of us knows what a monument is, because modern mankind is surrounded by numerous monuments of past eras.

Monuments and political ideology

Very often the transition of society to a new type of social order is accompanied by the demolition of old monuments of former political idols and the installation of new ones. And, as a rule, not the ancient monuments erected several centuries ago are destroyed, but the statues of those who were only recently exalted.

Our contemporaries remember very well how 25 years ago the cultural objects of the Soviet era were successfully destroyed in the country: the statues of Lenin and his entourage were being demolished, and stelae and statues of participants in the White movement and all those who suffered from the Bolsheviks were put in their place.

The culture of memory is a very important phenomenon for mankind, it's not for nothing that one of the sages said that those who build monuments think about the future. Memorial constructions give us all a moral lesson, they are carriers of certain values and traditions. Therefore, probably, the culture of monuments will be alive, while people live on the earth.